Ravenous Giant Black Holes Can Stunt Their Own Growth

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Supermassive black holes are a bit like the Cookie Monster,
gobbling up grub so greedily that they fling away huge amounts of
perfectly good "food," a new study suggests.

Researchers studying a faraway galaxy have detected a huge amount
of gas and dust spewing from the
supermassive black hole at its core. This flood of material
is so large that it's depriving the black hole of the food it
needs to continue growing — and it's limiting the galaxy's
ability to churn out new stars, researchers said.

"This is really a last gasp of this galaxy," said study author
Sylvain Veilleux, of the University of Maryland, in a statement.
"The black hole is belching its next meals into oblivion."
[ Photos: Black
Holes of the Universe ]

Studying a supermassive black hole

The astronomers used Hawaii's Gemini Observatory to study a
galaxy called Markarian 231 (Mrk 231 for short). Mrk 231 is about
600 million light-years from Earth, in the direction of the
constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).

Some estimates indicate that Mrk 231 has a mass about three times
that of our own Milky Way galaxy. Mrk 231's central black hole is
thought to have the equivalent of ten million solar masses —
about three times that of the supermassive black hole at the
heart of the Milky Way, researchers said.

Mrk 231 is in the final stages of a violent merger with another
galaxy, researchers said, and is currently gobbling up dust and
gas so voraciously that it is spawning a
powerful quasar. Quasars — huge outflows of radiation
from galactic black holes like Mrk 231's — are some of the
brightest objects in the universe.

The new Gemini observations reveal the power of the black hole's
appetite. Researchers detected gas and dust streaming from the
galactic core for at least 8,000 light-years in all directions.
This material is rocketing outward at more than 2.2 million mph
(3.5 million kph) — accelerated by the immense power of the
quasar.

The researchers will report their findings in the March 10 issue
of the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Becoming "red and dead"

The massive outflow is removing gas from Mrk 231's inner regions
incredibly quickly — more than 2.5 times as fast as stars can
form, researchers said. And that has big consequences for the
galaxy's evolution.

"The crucial thing is that the fireworks of new star formation
and black hole feeding are coming to an end, most likely as a
result of this outflow," said co-author David Rupke of Rhodes
College in Tennessee. [ Video: Black
Holes: Warping Time and Space ]

With less raw material lying around, the quasar will blink out
soon enough, and star-formation activity will draw to a close.
Eventually, Mrk 231 will consist of nothing but old and aging
stars, becoming a "red and dead" galaxy (so named because of how
it will look through a telescope).

As extreme as Mrk 231’s eating habits may be, they're probably
not unique. And neither is the galaxy's fate.

"When we look deep into space and back in time, quasars like this
one are seen in large numbers, and all of them may have gone
through shedding events like the one we are witnessing in Mrk
231," Veilleux said.